these fears of conscious

ZX slipped the gateman a crumpled one kuai bill for letting us out so late-early in the morning. I like these departures done at unreasonable hours; the exhaustion is numbness that makes the goodbye bearable. The private car that was to take me and three strangers to the Chongqing airport was platinum-colored (like every third car in China) and plushy. Still, by the time we were halfway there my bum was tired enough of the middle seat in the back that it was almost enough to keep me conscious.

I held my bag on my knees and elbowed the fat girl beside me when she squirmed into a better sleeping positionon on top of part of my leg. The girl in the front seat talked loudly. It was 3:00 am, 4:00 am, five. I tuned them out and slept with my head stretched straight back. At some point the radio was playing the long song/recitation tribute to the good earthquake rescue effort.
Yesterday parents from Mianzhu started marching to Chengdu to find somebody to protest to. Their kids died because government officials stole the money that was supposed to build strong schools. Sometimes there's no steel rebarb at all. Sometimes the sand/concrete ratio is 7/3 when it's supposed to be 3/7.

It's no wonder that nobody trusts anybody, and especially the officials. It's no wonder that their attempts to ensure their own safety seem to me seem so random, and so wildly out of proportion with reasonable risk. They see dangers that people who grew up in Japan or the US would never dream of, ZX tells me. They know that a building (or a bridge) doesn't even need the slightest of tremors to collapse, they're built so bad. Like "tofu" they say. When a paper rustles on the wall his head jerks alert, and by the end of my time there, I begin to imagine, like lots of others, that I feel the floor, or the bed moving beneath me all the time.

Teacher Xie gathered with her middle-aged friends outside the cross stitch shop. The park, the streets, and the riverside are packed, and have been since after lunch, when the whole city rushed outside as soon as they were done eating. Except for those that have to work, says Teacher Liu, who've gotta be inside (poor suckers, his tone says). He says when the experts and the people both listen to each other, they CAN predict it.

He carries his three-month old granddaughter, and he cradled her when he ran down the first time from the fourth floor. Teacher Xie lives on the fifth, and she and her husband stayed in the bathroom on that Monday afternoon. Two weeks later, it's four o'clock in the afternoon, the end of the 1:00-4:00 timeframe that was supposed to bring another tremor, but she won't go back because her younger sister told her that there's supposed to be one after four. She whispers to me that you only pass this information on quietly, and to close friends and family, because the government has warned them about spreading rumors, and they could be held responsible for creating panic. I don't feel anything for the rest of the evening except the kind that you think are probably your imagination, or it's him rocking the couch.

The car got to the airport right at six. The driver was talking to another guy from his company, and I asked the three women, "aren't you going to get out?" The dumb girl beside me jumped and half woke-up, "what, we're at the airport?" I don't know what was wrong with the other two, they weren't even sleeping. I slept until 6:45, checked in, found the gate, and slept again until we boarded, still numb.